Studies in Cola History and Administration c7.135

c7.135

because he was a contemporary of Karikāla, must have been appointed ruler of Kāñcī after Karikāla’s conquest of that place, and presumably by Karikāla himself. Mr. Srinivasa Aiyangar’s view of the relation between Karikāla and Iḷandiraiyan is not without interest in this connection. He rejects rightly,* as it seems to us, the attempt to blend together the story of Kiḷḷi’s missing son by the Nāga woman Pilivaḷai (Maṇimēkalai) and that given by Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar, and thus to make Iḷandiraiyan a grandson of Karikāla. But in his search for support to his theory of Iḷandiraiyan’s governorship of Kāñcī under Karikāla, he lights on the inscriptions of the Cōḷas of the Telugu country which say that Karikāla had a grandson called Toṇḍamāna,† and he says: “Iḷandiraiyan being the only known Toṇḍaimāṉ of the period is most probably this Toṇḍamāna.”